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Wednesday, October 10, 2012

[Link] How to Break Through Your Creative Block: Strategies from 90 of Today’s Most Exciting Creators

by Maria Popova

What extraordinary energy we expend, as a culture and a civilization, on trying to understand where good ideas come from, how creativity works, its secrets, its origins, its mechanisms, and the five-step action plan for coaxing it into manifestation. And little compares to the anguish that comes with the blockage of creative flow.

In 2010, designer and musician Alex Cornell found himself stumped by a creative block while trying to write an article about creative block. Deterred neither by the block nor by the irony, he reached out to some of his favorite artists and asked them for their coping strategies in such an event. The response was overwhelming in both volume and depth, inspiring Cornell to put together a collection on the subject. The result is Breakthrough!: 90 Proven Strategies to Overcome Creative Block and Spark Your Imagination (public library) — a small but potent compendium of field-tested, life-approved insight on optimizing the creative process from some of today’s most exciting artists, designers, illustrators, writers, and thinkers. From the many specific strategies — walks in nature, porn, destruction of technology, weeping — a few powerful universals emerge, including the role of procrastination, the importance of a gestation period for ideas, and, above all, the reminder that the “creative block” befalls everyone indiscriminately.

Bad Girls, Good Guys, and Two-Fisted Action

Sean
Taylor is an award-winning writer of stories. He grew up telling lies,
and he got pretty good at it, so now he writes them into full-blown
adventures for comic books, graphic novels, magazines, book anthologies
and novels. He makes stuff up for money, and he writes it down for fun.
He’s a lucky fellow that way.

He’s best known for his work on
the best-selling Gene Simmons Dominatrix comic book series from IDW
Publishing and Simmons Comics Group. He has also written comics for TV
properties such as the top-rated Oxygen Network series The Bad Girls
Club. His other forays into fiction include such realms as steampunk,
pulp, young adult, fantasy, super heroes, sci-fi, and even samurai frogs
on horseback (seriously, don’t laugh). However, his favorite
contribution to the world will be as the writer/editor who invented the
genre and coined the term "Hookerpunk."